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[Aquillion]

I'm sure this is already a known problem, but...

If you tag a plant for gathering, and your plant-gathering dwarves can't reach it (say, because it's on an island or something), they'll spam you with pathfinding errors and, presumably, idle around wasting time on it.  I assume this is a problem with other tasks, too.  It's particularly a problem when you can't figure out which of the seventeen million things you just tagged is causing the error.

Perhaps if a dwarf can't reach something, they should tag it as 'unreachable' somehow, so that as long as it remains unavailable, other possible targets that they can reach will get handled first, and so that they move on to other tasks if they can't reach anything they need for the current one?  The dwarves would still have to check every time they went for a new item to see if the player had made it accessable, but the tag could be used to prevent additional error messages when doing these checks, too, since it means the player has already been informed that the item is unreachable.

Just a thought, anyway.

[Toady One]

It's more of a bug -- the inaccessible jobs should clear, and it already keeps track of "components" for the cave, like islands.  Filled channels might be an exception.

[Aquillion]

When you say 'clear', is it supposed to untag the unreachable plant?  Because if it doesn't, wouldn't the dwarf just try and target it again as soon as their current job was reset?

Of course, untagging it could also be an annoyance if the situation making it unreachable is only temporary, or if only one dwarf is affected (one dwarf stuck in a room could decide that every plant in the world is unreachable and untag them all!)

[Toady One]

A dwarf that can't reach the plant shouldn't take the job in the first place, but I think they handle it like mining right now just go for it -- it puts the designation back when they cancel.  The inaccessible clearance was from inaccessible mining jobs, sorry for the confusion -- I get the designation jobs mixed up.  Mining is different because there can be several access points for a square, and to stop the miners from getting confused it will remove designations sometimes.  Plant designations are always replaced on cancel (I think), which would explain your spam.  If I just do a connectivity check, it will fix that.  Then only dwarves with access will reach it.  Any temporary connectivity changes in the dungeon would affect all jobs, and are a larger problem.  I'm not sure if I handle this for active channel flows or not.  There's some stuff for that, but maybe not enough.

For now, I'll put in the simple connectivity check for plant gathering.

Edit:  grrr...  it already has them.  so, I'll try to figure out why it's broken, instead.

[ August 12, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Toady One]

Actually, it seems to be working for regular islands (say the shore of the river on the opposite site).  Do you remember the particular set up?

[Aquillion]

Yeah.  It was a fairly large, long island in the middle of the outdoors river, where the river split in two and then met up again some distance north of my fortresses' main gate.  The only unusual thing about it was that the left-hand branch cut through a small swamp.  Anyway, I selected a bunch of plants to harvest at once, and tagged one near the bottom of the island by mistake.  It took me a while to figure out what was causing the spam, but once I noticed the one tagged plant on the island and untagged it, it stopped.

This happened with the latest version, but I believe the world and fortress were started in the first release version.

[ August 12, 2006: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Toady One]

Ah, outdoor island!  Yeah, that might be the same connectivity issue that is causing the drinking bug.  It's upcoming.